The production of articles of manufacture and premanufacture used in residential and commercial building and construction is well known. Such construction and/or building articles of manufacture include but are not limited to doors, door panels, door jambs, door thresholds, window frames, window sashes, interior and exterior moldings and trim, headers, backing, and footers for drywall, “Cant” strips, doorstop moldings, units or members comprising studs, joists, rafters, and trusses, posts-and-beams, rafters, ridge blocks, decorative shutters, and storm shutters.
In the case of construction of production of such articles of manufacture and premanufacture, the introduction of semi-automated manufacturing of such articles has reduced costs and increased speed of manufacturing such articles.
A key aspect of such semi-automated computer-aided manufacturing is tool selection and tool-path generation. Tool-path generation may be defined as the path or route a tool takes during a manufacturing process, and the movement or handling of the article under manufacture in order to produce a desired product. One basic example of tool selection, tool-path, and article path may be selecting a simple manual vertical drill press and configuring the tool path of the vertical drill press.
As in a single axis drill press, an article of manufacture would be fixed (no article tool-path) below a drill bit (for example, a wedge tool selection) rotating along a longitudinal axis and the rotating bit displaced distally in relation to the drill press and along the longitudinal axis by an operator and into the article of manufacture to bore a hole of a desired depth into the article of manufacture (the tool-path, which includes both drill bit rotation direction and rate, bit displacement and rate of displacement).
In a fully automated, computer-aided or controlled tool-path generated environment, a tool-path would be generated via a computer or computer processor, including the rotational speed of the bit, bit displacement as a function of time (i.e. velocity, acceleration, jerk, the speed or rate of bit displacement, the throw or distance of bit displacement, the length and depth of movement and number of cuts, etc.). Information regarding the material being processed which would impact the speed of the plunge, such as material hardness and the like and would impact various parameters, which are controlled by a computer or computer processor.
Modern computer-aided manufacturing (“CAM”) or computer numeric control (“CNC”) manufacturing typically utilize two or more axes of control and a plurality of interchangeable tool types with a plurality of tool functions in order to control tool-path generation. Each placement or movement of an article, each tool exchange, each movement of a selected tool not in contact with the article, each movement of a tool in contact with the article, and each movement of article itself is “preprogrammed” and executed by a processor (i.e. a system computer) to create a desired article of manufacture and to perform various manufacturing and machining steps to create an article of manufacture.
Known systems and methods to produce such articles of manufacture include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,033,005, 5,201,258, 5,255,207, 5,933,353, 6,134,338, 6,292,197, 6,459,952, 7,043,331, 7,328,539, 8,137,038, 8,225,579, 8,566,066, 9,720,401, US20020103557, US20030233163A1, US20050115375 and US20070265724.
However, these known systems and methods are deficient in many aspects and lack:                Adaptability: Known systems require feedstock specifications be preprogrammed into a tool-path generator prior to production runtime; and therefore, require feedstock of limited geometry based upon narrow specification tolerances. In other words, known systems anticipate feedstock of a certain geometry and require, on a per-run basis, reprogramming of a toolpath for feedstock of differing yet usable geometries.        Adequate feedstock and production article geometry validation: Known systems typically require pre-manufacturing of feedstock within tolerances compatible with preprogrammed feedstock specifications. If a feedstock is not pre-manufactured to specific tolerances, then pre-run manual measurements must be taken of the irregular feedstock to ensure proper programming and article production machine operation. This is time consuming and labor intensive. Moreover, typical operators of known systems often perform manual pre and/or post production geometry measurements for quality assurance or control purposes. However, performing manual pre or post production geometry measurements on a per article basis is extremely time consuming and labor intensive.        Automatic tool selection: Without automatic tool selection, the likelihood that an article of manufacture is out of specification or made via the wrong tool is greatly increased, which affects production efficiency and/or product quality, as well as manufacturing time. Manual systems lack automatic tool selection.        Design intent capture: In the case of articles of manufacture such as doors, door jams and the like, semi-automatic cutting, drilling, smoothing, and fitting elements are designed for manual quality assurance and control geometric measurement, resulting in deviation from the intent of a designer, lower production yields due to manual handling of articles, and undesirable tolerance rejects requiring article rework or scrap. Without design intent capture and mapping from nominal dimensions to production, the actual intentions of the designer are at the mercy of stock/blank dimensional tolerances, which decrease quality control and customer rejects.        
The result of these deficiencies in adaptability, adequate feedstock and production article geometry validation, automatic tool selection and design intent capture causes an undesirable tradeoff between production speed and product quality. In manual processes, exact article specifications would have to be loaded into the toolpath generator prior to runtime, which is very time consuming; while use of generic toolpaths do not provide for high accuracy and quality in a finished product (i.e. toolpath selection based on the nominal is not accurate enough).
Furthermore, manual feedstock measurement and tool-path regeneration and recalculation is time-consuming on a per-article basis; and design time quality control validation (nominal validation) only checks for design parameters, not actual production articles (i.e. there is very little geometry validation, often post-mortem, sometimes manually before run, but never on a per-door basis as it is too time-consuming).
Furthermore, quality assurance inspection of received feedstock (pre-production) is extremely time-consuming, labor intensive and expensive. Post-production quality control (on the back-end) of processed articles can be very wasteful. If an article is “under-cut” it may be re-processed and salvaged; however, if an article is “over-cut” it may have to be repurposed or scrapped.
Moreover, with known system manual tool selection and/or toolpath generation, typically either the finished article is of low precision and quality or article production speed is very slow.
Accordingly, the present invention is directed to solving all of these problems.